5 Digital Mapping Activities
On Monday I shared a couple of tutorials about measuring distances in Google Maps and Bing Maps. Yesterday, I shared a few resources for helping students understand map projections. This morning, I have some more tutorial videos that might help or inspire you to create digital mapping activities to use in your geography or history […]
Historical Scene Investigations – A Great Way to Get Students to Use Primary Sources
Historical Scene Investigation is one of my favorite resources for U.S. History teachers and students. I’ve used it and referred people to it for years. HSI presents students with historical cases to “crack” through the use of evidence found in the form of primary source documents. Historical Scene Investigation contains thirteen cases in which students […]
LOC Crowd – Crowdsourcing the Transcription of Primary Sources
The Library of Congress has launched a new crowdsourcing initiative to transcribe primary source documents. The new initiative simply called Crowd has contains collections of documents that the Library of Congress wants the public to help transcribe. Anyone can participate in the LOC’s Crowd project. To get started simply go to the site and click […]
Case Maker – Civics Lessons Built on Primary Sources
Case Maker is a free service designed for middle school social studies teachers and their students. Case Maker uses primary sources from the Library of Congress as the basis of activities in which students have to build a case in response to real civics scenarios. For example, the first cast that I tried was about […]
Youngzine – Great Current Events Resource
Youngzine is an excellent resource for anyone who needs ideas for current events lessons in an elementary school or middle school classroom. Youngzine articles feature a mix of news, sports, and entertainment stories for elementary school students. A new edition is published weekly. Most articles on Youngzine are accompanied by a supporting video. Articles that reference […]
5 Ways to Use Comics in Social Studies Lessons
Creating cartoons and comic strips can be a fun way for students to show their understanding of events and concepts. For the student who is intimidated (or bored) by the idea of writing yet another essay or making another PowerPoint presentation, creating a comic strip is a welcome change. Here are five ideas for using […]
21 Real World Math Lessons for High School Students
Getting to teach economics lessons is one of my favorite things about being a social studies teacher. In economics lessons high school students start to see how many of the math concepts, logic concepts, and political theory they’ve learned can apply to them in the “real world” after high school. Econ Ed Link is a […]
My Two Most Requested Documents
Last night I forgot to silence my phone before bed. Not ten minutes after putting my head on my pillow I heard a Google Drive alert. I looked over at my phone to see that someone had requested access to my file titled Life on Minimum Wage. That is one of the two most frequently […]
Media Literacy & Fake News – A Lesson Plan
C-SPAN Classroom has a new lesson plan that is quite timely given all of the recent stories about fake news stories created and shared through social media. Media Literacy & Fake News is a free lesson plan that is based on five C-SPAN videos featuring authors and other experts talking about the role of media […]
A Great Journal for History Teachers
The Library of Congress has quite a number of great resources for teachers and students. The Student Discovery Sets are favorite amongst my favorite resources that I’ve featured in the past. That collection of resources was recently updated by the LOC. The recent additions to the Student Discovery Sets include iBooks about the New Deal, scientific […]
More Than 100 Sets of Primary Source Documents for Students
A few years ago I wrote a post about searching through the Digital Public Library of America to locate primary source documents to use with students. At that point the DPLA had relatively few, loosely organized collections. Yesterday, I received an email from DPLA informing me that they now have more than 100 primary source […]
5 Online Activities for Teaching With Primary Sources
As a history teacher one of my favorite yet challenging things to do was introduce my students to primary sources. It’s great because it reveals to them a whole new world of research opportunities. There’s nothing better than a student saying, “wow! Mr. Byrne, look at this!” At the same time learning to read, evaluate, […]